1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a film deposition apparatus and a film deposition method for depositing a film on a substrate in a vacuum chamber, and a computer readable storage medium storing a computer program for causing the film deposition apparatus to carry out the film deposition method.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a film deposition method for depositing a thin film on a surface of a substrate such as a semiconductor wafer, there has been known a so-called Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) or Molecular Layer Deposition (MLD), where a first reaction gas and a second reaction gas are alternately supplied to the substrate, thereby depositing an atomic layer or a molecular layer of a reaction product. In such a film deposition method, when a film deposition temperature is low, for example, organic substances in the reaction gases may be incorporated into the film as impurities. In order to remove such impurities, an alteration process such as an annealing process and a plasma process may be carried out.
However, because the plasma process can only alter properties of an extremely shallow portion of the thin film, the film cannot be uniformly altered in a film thickness direction when the plasma process is carried out after the film deposition process is completed. In addition, when a plasma processing apparatus, which is provided separately from the film deposition apparatus, is used in order to carry out the plasma process, the substrate needs to be transferred from the film deposition apparatus to the plasma processing apparatus. Therefore, it takes a relatively long time to carry out the film deposition and the plasma alteration.
Incidentally, there have been proposed so-called semi-batch type film deposition apparatuses where a film deposition process is carried out by rotating a susceptor, on which plural substrates are placed, with respect to plural reaction gas supplying nozzles as disclosed in, for example, Patent Documents 1 to 3 listed below. However, Patent Documents 1 to 3 fail to provide concrete measures for solving the above problem.
Patent Document 1: U.S. Pat. No. 7,153,542 (FIGS. 8A, 8B).
Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Publication No. 3144664 (FIGS. 1 and 2, and claim 1).
Patent Document 3: U.S. Pat. No. 6,634,314.